For companies reliant on brand awareness and sales leads from Google search and Google Ads, a major shift is imminent as more searches move to LLM-based chatbots within the next 24 months. Product education and discovery are very different, and much less controllable, in an LLM world.
This is the biggest change in a generation, and it’s shaking up the highly honed and mechanized industry of SEO and internet ads. Gartner estimates that web search traffic will drop by 25% in 2026, and we have already seen significant user behavior changes due to powerful tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and others. Stack Overflow, a website for answering software coding questions, has already been materially impacted by LLMs.
Enter the phrase: "What are the best EV sedan vehicles in the United States?" and the LLMs or "robots" or "AIs" return different answers (Chathub is a useful tool for this).
Will prospects find your competitors first in the "LLM world?"
Based on discussions with companies and in our weekly GenAI Learning Lab (and especially insights from Rosemary Brisco), we recommend the following steps for AI leaders:
Educate your management team and CEO using live demos across top public LLMs.
Determine your AI strategy (leader, fast follower, slow follower, no follower).
Understand the strategic importance of Microsoft gaining search market share versus Google.
Learn more about Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), now called AI Overviews and positioned as "Let Google Do the Googling for You."
2. Monitor changes quarterly - top LLMs and summary.
Explore new vendors such as Revere, Brandrank.AI.
Use tools like Chathub.
3. Track emerging mitigating techniques. This is a very new, untested area and ideas abound. Here is a partial list:
Use "strategic text sequence" techniques, a format of text on your website that is optimized for search engines and LLMs (often includes questions).
Ensure a good SEO rating in Microsoft Bing, as some speculate that Microsoft may prioritize Bing rankings in the next training data set for ChatGPT.
Use site optimization techniques (here is a list from Rosemary Brisco, a valued member of our weekly GenAI Learning Lab).
These techniques can help you to safeguard your own projects against the threat of getting “lost in the mix” as AI starts to dictate where people will allocate their time in the attention economy.